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By Hunter Keeter
With development now officially underway, the industry team led by Lockheed Martin on the Navy's Long Range Land Attack Projectile (LRLAP) program has assessed as relatively low risk the hardening of guidance electronics units in relationship with balancing other factors such as airframe design and weapon lethality. "The area that has risk is the balance among airframe, warhead and rocket motor," Pete Jasanis, Lockheed Martin's AGS program manager, yesterday told Defense Daily during a telephone interview. "We have to create a robust airframe with range and lethality. Weight is not an issue because we are inside the weight bogey by a good margin. Aerodynamics, drag and range, we must pay attention to; these issues] to make sure we account for them." When developed, LRLAP is to be a 155mm, rocket-assisted and GPS-guided projectile component of a new Advanced Gun System (AGS) capable of throwing ordnance at a rate of 12 rounds per minute up to a range of 115 miles. United Defense; UDI]--prime contractor for AGS on the DD(X) warship National Team--this spring selected the Lockheed Martin-Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC) team over a rival bid from Raytheon; RTN] to develop LRLAP (Defense Daily, April 2).
A flight of LRLAP--now scheduled for FY '04--is a key element that must be demonstrated before a milestone review for DD(X) in FY '05. The physics of the LRLAP round itself must be defined much earlier than this flight to support the design of interdependent elements such as the gun magazine. The magazine in...